Joan Groves - The Last Island

“I am going over to the Deacon’s,” John Henry commented.

“For what?” Manta asked.

“I do not know. All I know is if anybody knows anything; it is the Deacon.”

“You are telling me that the Deacon is the answer,” I questioned her.

“I really do not know. I know that I don’t know. Maybe, if he is not the answer, he is part of the question,” she said.

If there is any innocence in truth, then this was the most truthful statement ever spoken.

If you are fortunate, you meet a person like the Deacon once in your life. It is also true that if you are fortunate you never meet a Deacon in your life. The character of the Deacon is elemental. Not precious like platinum, gold, or silver but more valuable like lead, iron, or copper.

In a gulp, the Deacon could observe, analyze, and decide the relevant method, mode, and means. I had always assumed that the Deacon had taught himself for there was such surety in his being as if he were the teacher and the student in a Zen moment—as if, after having made the mistake and then making the self-correction, he was satisfied in the final solution. There was nothing loose, dangling, or sloppy in his thinking, in his actions, or in his way of life. Discipline, order, nor regiment was the Deacon’s lifestyle nor was it worship of all things correct and proper; it was that like all refined elements the dross of his life had been burned off, disregarded, and discounted.

I did not know if the Deacon was the question or if the Deacon was the answer but I did know that if there were a question, I would ask the Deacon and if there were an answer, I would be astute to listen to his voice.

We confessed our fears of what to us seemed the only course of events. As there is no way to walk off an island, there seemed no way on this island except to the Deacon. Question or answer, right or wrong—the pathway led to the Deacon’s door and then to him.

On a small island, there is commonality in where you live due to the smallness of the land mass and how you live is due to the limitedness of choice. What was true for the other citizens of the island was true for the Deacon, also. It was not that it was different for it was the same; it was that it was somehow different because it was the same.

Manta, John Henry, and I stood there like three little children in front of the old Hag’s house on Halloween wondering if we had enough nerve to ask for sweets.

Inside and seated Manta was drinking water, John Henry was drinking iced tea, and I was nursing a frozen coke while reaching for a cream-filled cupcake. If any of us had been dressed, we could have passed for citizens of polite society but, as it was, we were natives of the bush. Strange, I had been in the company of the Deacon and I had even been in his home by myself and I had been there with friends but I assumed a certainty and he simply did not embarrass me by going below or going above my expectations of him. Not knowing what to expect, I could not have expected more of the Deacon.

Manta was relaxed. John Henry was leaking energy. I was in a ready state. The Deacon looked at us with his back to the window and, with the cadence and tone of a Baptist preacher beginning a sermon, he began low and slow.

“He was alive—once. He was very much alive. He was like you. He was like me. There is a question: Do we deserve our fate?”

We all knew that it was a rhetorical comment and so followed his voice with absolute concentration of will.

“It did not begin with him. It is that he swam into his fate.” He paused and looked into the deep. Then he continued, “Have you ever thought about it ?”

None of us said anything but we looked at each other— it ?

“Whatever happened to it ?”

It ?

“He and I never, and I suppose no one ever, thinks about it but we swam into its effect and he was once alive and now is not.”

I thought to myself , What does he mean?

“The tank and the story are one and the same. The story needed the tank and the tank needed the story.”

I knew it! I knew it! I said to myself.

“Both were needed and both had to be a large enough lie to seem true.”

Well, that makes sense in the non-sensible way of reality.

But, it was not a lie for he did not profit from it and, after all, there is an ethic to lying and, as it were, the tank and the tall tale were in the fine traditions of yarn-spinning.

It? It! It. What is it? I waited silently.

“We found the truth of it . We were not the first. We had never even wondered about it as others have but we literally swam into it .”

What is it?

He began again.

“Manta, you remember when we first arrived on the island?”

Manta said yes with his eyes.

“We were just a couple of dive buddies looking for the perfect double dive. We were just having fun. Then we dove the sub. It was fun, at first. With our cute pastel suits, we thought we were something. Then there was a change. That scroll was what ended our fun, that scroll, if only we had never made contact with that scroll. That ship of the damned would not have damned and ended his life and damned my life.”

Was that it? Was that scroll it? How could a scroll exist underwater for so long? What the—! I couldn’t help thinking.

“That stupid gold scroll! Why had fate chosen us? Had we chosen our own fate?”

Gold, okay .

Gold!

I dreamed.

Well, that makes sense.

The light was behind him. The Deacon sat down. The chair was large and very ornate. The legs had carvings that resembled the legs and paws of a lion. The ornate brow of the chair imparted the illusion of wings. His dreadlocks imparted the impression of a mature lion’s mane.

I thought to myself, the Deacon is a little girl who is scared of an enchanted trinket .

The Deacon continued. With his hands clenched over the arm rails of the chair, it was truly the image of the talking Sphinx.

“The scroll was not it .”

I thought.

What the—It is not it!

“B-A-B-Y-L-O-N,” he spelled.

“B-A-B-E-L-I-O-N,” he spelled.

What the—, I thought.

John Henry and Manta were paralyzed.

Then he began to address a fifth person in the room but there was no fifth person in the room.

“Balal means to confuse. Babel, if you wish, means the ‘The Gate of God’. That was where the first great city arose. After exponential millennia, a great city arose overnight from the desolate sands of a waterless dessert. Ur, it was called and it arose overnight. A metropolis constructed, erected, assembled without previous knowledge. And, that is it—where was the previous knowledge base?”

“ It was outside ‘The Gate of God’.”

John Henry and Manta were now enslaved.

I thought , It was an old dead city.

The Deacon continued talking ever more directly at the person who was not there.

“Ur was not it .”

What the—, I thought.

“Outside the Gate of God, Ur, a great city, arose. A master builder’s mind was involved. But how was it possible to have such a complete knowledge on the first attempt? And, he built a city.”

The Deacon was preaching and John Henry, Manta, and the unobserved one were the congregation.

But, I did not concentrate on them.

That sounded familiar. I knew those words. Wait, wait, wait—that’s it! Is he crazy? I thought. He is not serious. He’s mad.

He cannot mean that is it . I looked at him to detect if there were any sign that would betray him. He was still. He was quiet. He was looking at the one who was not present.